There’s a pattern here to see

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I hate to break it to Geoff, but linguification ain’t dead yet (at least, not as I understand the term). Earlier today on Morning Edition, Robert Smith commented on Rudy Giuliani’s likely exit from the run for the Republican presidential nomination. (The following is from the audio of the story; the text is slightly different.)

It didn’t take long before the crowd started to notice that Giuliani was speaking about his campaign in the past tense, and with a sense of nostalgia. “The responsiblity of leadership doesn’t end with a single campaign. If you believe in a cause, it goes on, and you continue to fight for it, and we will.”

For your convenience, I’ve highlighted the verbs in the Giuliani quotation. Any of them in the past tense?

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Ben Zimmer is more on the ball than I am this MLK holiday weekend (as he has been in the past): he couldn’t even wait until the water cooler tomorrow to tell me about this Reuters article, which begins like this:

Indiana Jones’ spirit certainly infects the intrepid heroes of “The Linguists.” These are bold academics who plunge into the jungles and backwater villages of the world to rescue living tongues about to go extinct.

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At the water cooler earlier, Ben Zimmer told me about this NYT A&E article on the documentary The Linguists, which I mentioned last month. The focus of the NYT article is on documentary filmmaker Jeremy Newberger, but the urgency suggested by the article’s title (”Racing to Capture Vanishing Languages”) requires some explanation:

“We’re trying to capture a story in a limited amount of time, and the linguists are trying to recover a language before it dies, which might even happen while we are there,” Mr. Miller said. “Everyone was on edge.”

Dr. Anderson and Dr. Harrison worked on a report issued in September indicating that out of the world’s 7,000 languages, one is lost every few weeks. It is a human rights issue, Dr. Anderson said, as many native languages are silenced because of colonialism. Dying languages could also hold the key to finding native treatments for disease.

And then there are the less tangible reasons. “Language is essentially a historical library of information about a people and a culture,” Dr. Anderson said. “There are a lot of people who intrinsically value the search for knowledge.”

This summarizes much of K. David Harrison’s argument in his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (which I announced here), though of course I think it’s still worth reading the book for more details (and seeing the documentary whenever it’s distributed).

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Speaking (a tad belatedly) of English-only insanity (of the non-parodic kind), y’all might want to take a look at the mass of comments on my “Speak xkcd or die” from earlier this month (Dec. 6). I believe this is the most commentary I’ve ever gotten on a post (35 so far, several in just the past week or so). Almost certainly, many of these comments are the longest ever for one of my posts. And no doubt, several of these comments contain some very virulent vitriol (sorry, couldn’t resist the alliteration). People really seem to care about this national language business, and folks like Fred Thompson are speaking right to them.

I haven’t censored any of the comments, and so far I have also resisted any temptation to jump in and respond to any of them. Like the comic that was the subject of the post, I think each comment speaks for itself. But I will add here one overall response, a quote from Sally Johnson’s excellent 2001 Journal of Sociolinguistics article (”Who’s misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media”), which I found via American English: Dialects and Variation (by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes; see p. 212).

“It is not language per se, but its power to function as a ‘proxy’ for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language.” (Johnson 2001, p. 599)

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It’s Bring a Friend to Work Weekend (BaFtWWe) here at Language Log Plaza, and I decided to bring two friends, my UCSD colleagues Andy Kehler and Roger Levy. They’ve both been dying to meet some of the senior writing staff, but nobody seems to be around. (Funny, since it was a couple of members of the senior staff who told me about BaFtWWe in the first place. Hmm.) Anyway, while I was running around trying to find Mark, Arnold, either of the Geoffs, Bill, Sally, Roger, or anyone at all really, I left Andy and Roger by the water cooler, which we’ve recently equipped with a recording device in order to capture the unique conversations that so often take place there. Here’s an expurgated transcript of Andy and Roger’s conversation which I thought Language Log readers might enjoy.

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Negation can be a tricky thing, as has been discussed many times here on Language Log before. Back in grad school, my first-semester semantics course was with Veneeta Dayal and our textbook was (the first edition of) Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet’s Meaning and Grammar, in which “more colloquial” forms of expressing propositional negation were typically replaced with the somewhat more stilted “it is not the case that”, so that a sentence like “Pavarotti is not hungry” is expressed as “It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry” — or, if you prefer, “That Pavarotti is hungry is not the case”.

(Lots of examples in Meaning and Grammar involve Pavarotti, James Bond, and Sophia Loren, commenting on their hunger and boringness, asking whether they like each other, claiming that Sophia Loren thinks Pavarotti is French, etc. Don’t ask.)

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Following up on Bill’s post from last night: Kevin Holbert may be the first self-identified linguistics student to be a Jeopardy! contestant, but he’s certainly not the first linguistics student to be a Jeopardy! contestant tout court. Eight years ago this month, there was a 1-time Jeopardy! champ named Todd O’Bryan. Todd self-identified as “[a] graduate student originally from Louisville, Kentucky” (thus also following up on my post from yesterday), but more specifically, Todd was then a linguistics student in what became my own home department at UCSD — as Todd’s web page clarifies.

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I’m spending the holidays with my wife’s family in Louisville, KY this year. At breakfast this morning I picked up yesterday’s Courier-Journal and started laughing so hard I almost coughed up my oatmeal. I wasn’t reading the comics — it was the headline for the top story in the business section that had me going.

Yum executive Hearl will retire
Eaton to be new development chief

At the risk of over-explaining the joke, more context may be necessary.

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Way back on National Preposition Day, Roger Shuy wondered what things would be like if we just got rid of those pesky prepositions. In the meantime, I was corresponding with a student who wanted to enroll in a course of mine next quarter. When I granted permission, the student wrote (emphasis on the eggcorn added):

I thought I would end up going through linguistics with drawls next quarter.

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Earlier this year I told you about the publication of the book When Languages Die by K. David Harrison, then I told you about some of the media coverage of the work behind the book, and then I told you about Harrison’s appearance on The Colbert Report. I’m now happy to report to the Language Log readership that an NSF-supported documentary starring Harrison and his colleague Greg Anderson is scheduled to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January!

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